The Stage Taught Me How to Project My Voice. Life is Teaching Me How to Trust It.

The Stage Taught Me How to Project My Voice. Lately, I've found myself reflecting on a couple of situations that left me with the same feeling.

Different circumstances.

The same lesson.

The feeling of the goalposts moving.

Of expectations appearing after the event rather than before it.

Of trying to make sense of conversations where everyone walks away holding a different version of what was said.

Communication is a strange thing. We all hear words through the lens of our own experiences, assumptions and needs. Sometimes people genuinely remember conversations differently. Sometimes expectations aren't spoken until disappointment has already arrived.

What I've realised is that disappointment doesn't automatically make someone else's expectation my responsibility.

Not every invitation creates an obligation.

Not every misunderstanding has a villain.

Not every boundary is rejection.

These experiences made me question something much bigger than the conversations themselves. They reminded me of the person I used to be.

There was a time when I would have stayed quiet. I would have apologised just to make someone else comfortable. I would have carried the guilt, even when I wasn't sure it belonged to me. I would have replayed every word, wondering if I should have sacrificed my own truth to protect someone else's feelings.

This time I didn't.

I listened.

I acknowledged their feelings.

I explained my own.

I thanked people for their honesty.

I set boundaries for the future.

I admitted when I was upset.

And then I allowed my voice to exist alongside theirs.

That, to me, is what growth looks like.

Around the same time, I received the news that I'd been selected to perform Daisy Green Found Her Voice at Midlands Fringe.

The timing didn't escape me.

For years, I thought finding my voice meant writing poems. Then it became reading them aloud. Then standing on stages, microphone in hand, sharing parts of myself I once kept hidden.

But perhaps finding your voice isn't a destination at all.

Perhaps it's a practice.

It's choosing honesty over silence.

It's setting boundaries without apology.

It's listening without losing yourself.

It's accepting that not everyone will agree with your perspective, and knowing that's okay.

Every difficult conversation becomes another opportunity to trust yourself a little more.

To stop chasing moving goalposts.

To stop carrying responsibility that was never yours to begin with.

Finding my voice isn't about winning arguments.

It isn't about always being right.

It's about trusting my own experience enough to speak it with kindness, honesty and respect.

The stage taught me how to project my voice.

Life is teaching me how to trust it.

And perhaps that's what Daisy Green Found Her Voice has really been about all along.